As the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence approaches on July 4, history teachers across the United States are confronting a dual challenge: bringing the nation’s founding document alive for a generation of students while navigating intense political pressures over how to teach a complicated and contested past. Interviews with educators, students, and curriculum developers reveal a moment in which many teachers are doubling down on inquiry-based, evidence-focused history, even as they report rising anxiety about community and political backlash.
At First Avenue Middle School in Arcadia, California, eighth-grade history teacher Karalee Wong Nakatsuka uses a simple T-shirt that reads “Created Equal” to start a conversation with her mostly Asian American students about the Declaration and its limits. “From the beginning,” she said, “we talk about the Declaration.” Her lessons are shaped by the fact that the nation took decades—and a Civil War—to extend its founding promise to African Americans, a tension that resonates with students who today confront news about birthright citizenship, ICE arrests, and deportations in their own community.
Across the country, teachers report that the political climate is making civics education more precarious. A survey released by the nonprofit iCivics found that more than half of teachers now feel teaching basic civics concepts is “difficult,” while nearly six in 10 worry about potential backlash for teaching something the “wrong way.” About 20% said they have already experienced backlash for lessons they have taught, and more than one in three said they have changed or removed lessons they typically teach because of the climate in their school or community.
“Civics teachers are not OK, and that stinks, no matter what year it is,” said Emma Humphries, iCivics’ chief education officer. “But it’s really awful when we should be in a more celebratory mood.” The group launched a campaign called “We Can Teach Hard Things,” with the tagline: “We don’t stop teaching algebra when working with polynomials gets hard. Nor should we stop teaching civics when explaining the rule of law gets hard.”
The pedagogical urgency is underscored by surveys showing broad gaps in civic knowledge. Only 47% of adults could correctly identify why the original 13 Colonies declared independence, according to a recent survey cited by the article’s sources. Among Generation Z, researchers at Tufts University found that nearly one in three displayed “dismissive detachment” from democracy, with low confidence in the governing system and higher-than-average support for authoritarianism.
Teachers say students are ready to wrestle with the gaps between American ideals and American realities. At East Kentwood High School in Western Michigan, teacher Matthew Vriesman asks his students: “Who was it originally for? Who is it for now?” He sees the anniversary as an opportune moment. “If you really think about it, high school history class is an incredible opportunity,” Vriesman said. “This is the last time where people in this country are forced to sit and think and write about the founding values. This is the last time.”
In Vriesman’s classroom, which includes students from Somalia to farm country, the conversations surface what he calls “basic Enlightenment values” even before students study the Declaration. “They literally create this before they even know what the Declaration of Independence really is,” he said. Student Christina Le, 18, whose parents emigrated from Vietnam, said learning history as something more than a “founding myth” is essential. “The founders are really seen as mythological figures in a sense, and they’re portrayed as more heroic,” Le said. “But when you start studying them more, you see them more as flawed human beings.” She added that understanding the founders as “men who were created through the context of the Revolutionary War” helps students grapple with the unresolved question of whose liberty they were fighting for.
Her classmate Hawathiya Mulual, 17, the child of Sudanese and Ethiopian refugees, said her engagement with history deepened after the 2020 killing of George Floyd. “When you saw justice was so hard to achieve—why was it so hard to condemn those police officers involved?” Mulual said. That moment, she said, made her want to understand how the country’s founding principles had been applied and denied across generations.
Curriculum developers and museum educators say the most effective approach for students is a story-driven, evidence-based one that moves beyond names and dates. The Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia emphasizes everyday soldiers and enslaved people rather than generals and kings, featuring figures such as Joseph Plumb Martin, a Connecticut teenager who joined the militia, and London Pleasants, an enslaved 15-year-old who fled to British lines. “I think a lot of young people aren’t necessarily hungry for Revolutionary War history, but they are really fascinated by stories,” said Tyler Putnam, the museum’s senior manager for gallery interpretation.
The Digital History Group’s “Reading Like a Historian” program, used in classrooms nationwide, has students analyze competing primary sources—paintings, engravings, letters, and eyewitness accounts—to answer questions such as who fired first at the Battle of Lexington. “History has never been uncontested,” said Joel Breakstone, a former Stanford History Education Group director.
The 250th anniversary arrives as the federal government pushes its own vision of the past. President Donald Trump signed an executive order promoting “patriotic education,” and the U.S. Department of Education recently announced grants to encourage “informed patriotism and love of country.” In Philadelphia, the National Park Service removed explanatory panels detailing the U.S. slave trade from the President’s House Site, where George Washington and John Adams once lived; the city sued, and a federal judge ordered the display reinstated, comparing the administration to the propaganda-spewing “Ministry of Truth” in George Orwell’s 1984.
Brian Kisida, an associate professor at the University of Missouri and co-director of its Arts, Humanities, & Civic Engagement Lab, said the political pressure placed on teachers is largely undeserved. His research found that teachers as a group are more pro-America than the general public, with 62% saying the country is “a fundamentally good country,” compared with 55% of adults overall. He emphasized that familiarity with founding documents is not enough: “The people that stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, lots of them had these in their pockets,” he said, holding up a pocket-sized Constitution, “so we have to do a better job of explaining why these principles embedded in the Constitution and other American values are actually essential to democratic life and sustaining the American experiment.”
At Vertex Partnership Academies, a charter school in New York’s South Bronx, students recite the preamble to the Constitution each morning. Ian Rowe, the school’s CEO and co-founder, helped create the 1776 Unites curriculum to highlight stories of Black achievement throughout U.S. history. “You have to tell the whole story of our founding, warts and all,” Rowe said. “And you have to show how documents like The Declaration, the Bill of Rights, the Constitution, all of it, have enabled the country to move in a direction that is unparalleled in the world.”
For teachers on the ground, the day-to-day priority remains engagement. Vriesman said students can easily see through overly patriotic narratives that don’t square with their experiences. “If we describe a world to them that doesn’t actually resonate with their reality—some of the overly patriotic, ‘You have to know about these 10 guys who solved all the world’s problems’—that’s not a compelling argument.” His student Le put it more bluntly: “Part of the fun of studying history is studying struggle and resistance. How boring would it be to only see one perspective?”